Lucy Stone was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1818. She attended the first woman's college, Oberlin College in Ohio, and graduated in 1847. After that, she became one of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's lecturers and also spoke on her own about women's rights. In 1850, she organized the first national women's rights convention.
In 1855, Lucy married the Ohio abolitionist Henry B. Blackwell. However, she kept her maiden name as her last name, showing her protest against inequality between men and women. This keeping of the maiden name became legal under the Lucy Stone Law. Lucy also supported Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Women's National Loyal League during the Civil War.
In 1861, Lucy was elected president of the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association, which she also helped organize. Also that year, she went to Kansas and New York and joined the women's suffrage amendment campaigns there. In 1898, she organized the New England Woman Suffrage Association and in November 1869, Lucy formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. This organization helped raise money for the Women's Journal, a weekly magazine that first appeared in 1870. In 1872, she became Woman's Journal's co-editor with her husband.
After 1890, Lucy was a National American Woman Suffrage Association executive board chairman until her death. She died in Dorchester in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 18, 1893.
